System Error: Al-Yamamah Mix (Podcast Aesthetics)
by Paul D. Miller
aka Dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid
// Listen
to the Podcast
“A state of war only serves as an excuse for domestic tyranny.”
Alexander Solzhennitsyn
A couple of years ago, a Saudi oil minister made what has become
one of the more prophetic statements to come out of the Middle
East in a long time: “The Stone Age didn’t end for
lack of stone, and the Oil Age will end long before the world
runs out of oil.” It was a lament, an acknowledgement that
a day of reckoning was coming that would change the global balance
of wealth and power. The mix I created for the “System Error”
show is a reflection of a series of geographic interventions that
looks at that statement from the viewpoint of sound – it
envisages an audio theater in the tradition of John Cage, with
his 1939 composition “Imaginary Landscape,” that was
the first work written for turntables, or composers like Duke
Ellington with his “Afro-Eurasian Eclipse” symphony
that quoted music from around the world. Essentially, this is
a work that represents a practice of diaspora based on the hidden
linkages in sound from a world that responds to the politics of
perception. From the production processes of the information age’s
collision with the values of the 20th century – mass media,
mass production - to the digital ethos of the 21st century –
rip, mix, burn, mass customization – the basic fact that
music is a de-materialized experience for most of us that runs
through everything from the Ipod playlist to the networks that
people send mp3’s, videos on Youtube, or life on Flickr,
brings us full circle into a world where you are what you consume.
I like to think of this mix as a mirror I’ve held up to
society: it’s a reflection of the way we live now. Perhaps,
just perhaps, that Saudi oil minister was right.
In the 21st century, parables of warfare information control systems
like George Orwell's hyper-revisionist “1984,” have now
become commonplace. In the 21st century we’re faced with
a world where “newspeak” refracts what we thought
about as even the origins of the Iraq conflict blur beyond any
sustainable logic – weapons of mass destruction have become
weapons of mass distraction in the U.S. media. Who are we at war
with? Oceania or Eurasia? The Axis of Evil? Hugo Chavez? War is
diplomacy by other means. It’s been said that “architecture
is nothing but frozen music.” I want to reverse engineer
that phrase and unpack some of the sonic issues that collage brings
to the global stage – what happens when music becomes liquid
architecture? Apply that scenario to info war and music, and you
arrive at “System Error.” The “For Promotional
Use Only (Al-Yamamah)” project that accompanies this catalog
is a social sculpture of radically disparate voices: it exists
in the tradition of Grandmaster Flash’s “Adventures
on the Wheels of Steel” or Afrika Bambaata’s “Death
Mix” – classic hip hop that completely destroyed what
people thought “mix culture” was about. “System
Error (For Promotional Use Only)” isn’t about simply
re-ordering facts and numbers - it shuffles the contemporary imagination
like a deck of cards and, in the process, subverts the “rational
arrangement” of systems of media. The project explodes linear
narrative so that some other meanings can manifest. In the realm
of “fair use” that dj culture comes out of, the “System
Error” mix synthesizes a fictional realm where people like
Turkey’s Mercan Dede, London’s Roots Manuva, Brooklyn’s
Matisyahu, Israel’s “Subliminal and the Shadow,”
Jamaica’s Mutabaruka, Iran’s Sussan Deyhim, Pakistan’s
Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Lebanon’s Clotaire K, California’s
Zack De La Rocha, the minimalism of Irannian composer David Abir,
or the jazz of Evan Parker’s saxophone, or the people of
the hip hop diaspora like Saul Williams, DJ Shadow, Rob Swift,
Asian Dub Foundation, or scribes like Arundhati Roy can coexist
as data points in a constellation of digital information. All
these figures inhabit a place where sound functions as a palette
for creative endeavor.
How do you use the media to tell a story? At heart, “System
Error” paints a tale of the last several years – of
media disinformation, for example - highlighting Bush’s
statements as found sound, or sampling various “maqam”
songs from Iraq mixed with hip hop, which show a simple connection
between how music reflects the data-aesthetics of information
networks. It presents rumors of war: I like to think of it as
data-bootlegs, the currency of a world economy of sound filtered
through regional concerns. Think of it as contemporary art that
brings you the world from fragments of sound. It’s a tableau
made of soundbites collaged, dispersed and condensed into material
that reflects a realm of infinite possibility. Marcel Duchamp,
James Rosenquist, Jeff Koons, David Hammons, Joseph Kosuth…
the list of visual artists with a relationship to “appropriation”
art is almost a catalog of the major art movements of the 20th
century that the 21st century has inherited. I just wanted to
look at the issue from the viewpoint of acoustic space. What happens
when this type of collage is applied to sound? Maybe that’s
a question that Nam Jun Paik was striving to answer with his “Global
Groove” mixes 30 years ago.
There are a couple of issues driving this scenario – theater,
memory games, and the early Surrealist game of the “cadavre
exquis.” I like to think of it as additive synthesis in
a digital media context: it’s art culled from the viewpoint
of collective memory. First, let’s begin with a sense of
humor. This project comes out of a discussion I had with the artist/curator
Naeem Mohaimen about why South Asian music blends so well with
contemporary hiphop. I simply explained that the Caribbean is
the central point of diaspora with this situation - its rhythms
have reached back to every region of the world – from the
from the Rai music of Algeria, to Bhangra and Qawwali of South
Asia, from the Afro-beat of Nigeria, to the Kwaito of South Africa,
to the dubstep of London, the echo of the Jamaican soundsystem
ethos of tape collage and bass minimalism defines most of what
we think of as “modern music” in today’s digital
culture. I guess you could say that Jamaica is the “loudest
island in the world” and the British Commonwealth is an
echo chamber of the elements I chose to mix for this particular
project. But there are other elements like, for example, the West
Point Drum Corps (they don’t exactly jam with Sufi mystics
like Mercan Dede everyday!). Second there’s the irreverence
that children of the digital age show for historical boundaries
– why not go to the Souk in Tunis and hear young kids rhyming
in Arabic over Rai music remixes of Dr. Dre beats, or for that
matter, listen to groups like Cold Cut sample Yemenite-Israeli
singer Ofra Haza for their classic remix of Eric B. and Rakim’s
“Paid in Full?”
I want to nudge people to think about art not just as objects,
but as a collective endeavor where memory is translated through
the filter of sound. This kind of collage looks at the words of
the singers, the sounds that I scratched into the rhythms, the
beats and elements that I put in collision with one another, as
a simulation of history: it’s all a soundtrack to the end
of the Oil age. Loop, repeat, refract: its just modern storytelling
by other means. By the way, Al-Yamamah means “the dove”
in Arabic, it’s the name of the project at the heart of
a recent series of scandals in the U.K. involving slush funds,
oil sheiks, Swiss banks, kickbacks, blackmail, bagmen, arms deals,
war plans, climbdowns, big lies, Dick Cheney and Tony Blair -
it's a scandal that has it all, corruption and cowardice at the
highest levels, a festering canker at the very heart of world
politics, where the War on Terror meets the slaughter in Iraq.
Yet chances are you've never heard about it - even though it happened
just a few days ago. The fog of war profiteering, it seems, is
just as thick as the fog of war. This is a soundtrack that maybe,
just maybe, might get you to think that another world is possible.
For me, music isn’t music – it’s information:
that’s what art is about - this is just a start. As information,
it fits into a complex niche in today’s modern digital economy,
a place where data is the most pervasive and intangible feature
of the everyday world we inhabit. War is, regretfully, a system
made of information control systems, and this mix is an essay
on the topic of how music filters through the networks of modern
info culture – it charts a cartography made of invisible
flow charts, graphs, and statistical data bases (after all, sampling
is a mathematical model for analyzing large amounts of information
like population growth for the census, etc etc). Remember –
the “System Error” mix is strictly “for promotional
use only.” Think of this mix as a memetic virus, and spread
the word!
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OUT NOW! DJ Spooky's "Sound Unbound"
CREATION REBEL MIX CD on Trojan Records
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DJ Spooky has produced material on the new Yoko Ono album.
DJ Spooky and the 2007 Venice Biennial
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